Alkisah

Together for a decade, the Indonesian duo Senyawa have a root sound that could lie in a traditional ceremony, though heavily amplified via the use of guitars, metal percussion and self-constructed instruments. These latter hover between being string or percussion implements, often sounding like hybrid grafts. Vocalist Rully Shabara projects a shamanic aura, frequently chanting, or invoking, without restraint: rasping, resonant and unhinged. When they gig, Wukir Suryadi mostly plays guitar, but in the recording studio it's easier for him to range around his homemade array, explaining the difficulty for the listener to separate string-bending from percussive stressing. The metallic scrapes and explosions sound massive, but could be the result of an intimately-placed microphone, or an alarmingly loud amplifier.

There's always a tactile tension to the strings, a sprung quality that's exaggerated through a Marshall stack. On the first part of the title-track, an obsessively repeated riff-line maintains tension, while Shabara lays down multiple vocal parts, then ‘Menuju Muara’ increases the density, in an actual song form. There's the sound of rubbing, but probably not a turntable, and the gush of a heavy storm, more likely a distressed pedal-fuzz. ‘Istana’ sounds like a glottal choir in a dark cave, with lead-weight guitar, voices sustained and incantatory. There's an even stronger song-structure for ‘Kabau’, at least in conventional terms. Senyawa excel at combining primitivist ritual with primitivist rampage, resulting in an elaborately complicated collision.